Transcend the mundane, create the new and enrich the world

What is the mundane, and why might you want to transcend it?

Mundane world is the everyday world, a default reality where you spend most of your waking life. It is a world of descriptions. If something can be named, described and explained, it’s part of mundane world. Mundane world contains the sum total of everything we know and everything the rational mind can imagine.

Mundane world is both an enabler and a tyrant, enabling you to get things done but making you a slave to reason, demanding the use of synthetic imagination and insisting that creative imagination does not and cannot exist.

Situated in mundane world, you experience only a representation of reality — a video that you mistake for the live performance.

As if that isn’t bad enough, possibilities for generative thought and action are hampered by a barrage of rules, norms, codes, beliefs, dogmas, narratives and ideologies.

Mundane world is brought forth by the brain’s left hemisphere.

Philosopher and neuroscience researcher Dr Iain McGilchrist lists these left hemisphere characteristics among others:

Attention is local, narrow, focused.
Sees parts, not wholes.
Sees an inanimate world of things.
Thinking is decontextualized and systematic.
Closes down to certainty.
Sees the world as something like a map, a schema, a diagram, a theory — something two dimensional.
Helps us manipulate the world.
Deals with static things.
Living in the body, rather as we drive a car.

You transcend the mundane in order to enter primal world and embody intent, the generative impulse that streams from the unmanifest into the manifest through the gap in time.

With intent incorporated into your being, your creative (in contrast to synthetic) imagination is awakened, enabling you to envisage possibilities for enriching the world, or a particular piece of it, with value, meaning and joy.

Two forms of imagination: synthetic and creative

Read about the two forms of imagination: creative and synthetic

Also awakened is the power to bring into being new creations that convert these possibilities into actuality.

You have to understand that there are dimensions. In the dimension we call the world¹, a person needs logic. He needs it badly. He needs to be able to analyze and take apart things and put them back together again. He needs to spot flaws in reasoning and multiple deceptions. He needs to recognize formal arguments and trace them all the way through from assumptions to conclusions. But in the dimension where creative power operates², where things happen that most certainly impact this world, all bets are off. He needs to understand and experience and launch a kind of vast freedom for his own imagination that takes him entirely out of the realm of being a normal person, a foolish and provincial “realist,” a mechanically thinking human. He has to go light-years past that. He has to stop pretending he is some kind of scientist. In other words, he has to stop burying his own power. Two dimensions, two capabilities.

Jon Rappoport, The Magician Awakes, cited in The Space, the Magician, and the Man of Science, also by Jon Rappoport

1. Mundane world.

2. Primal world.

Newcreators do not shun mundane world. Rather, they inhabit whichever world is right for the task at hand.

For example, primal world is where they imagine world-enriching possibilities, and mundane world is where they make plans for actualising these possibilities and where they put their plans into action.

Primal world is not the place to be when shopping for groceries or preparing your tax return.

When you transcend the mundane, where do you arrive?

You find yourself in primal world — a place of pure perception where you experience reality in the raw, untamed, unfiltered, uncodified and unconceptualised.

Primal world cannot be explained or proved to exist. It can only be experienced.

It is a world you would be very familiar with if raised in the wilderness by wolves.

Immersed in primal world, you are one with intent, with creative imagination at the ready.

Intent has two aspects.

One is the originating aspect, which is concerned with initiating new creations.

The other is the fulfilling aspect, concerned with bringing these creations to fullness.

How the Newcreator becomes a channel for intent

Together, the creative powers Groundedness (1), Faith (4) and Openness (7) form the superpower Transcend the Mundane. (The other superpowers are Create the New and Enrich the World.)

The 147 assembly is analogous to a UK three-pin electrical plug. Each pin has a specific function, and all three pins must be engaged for the plug to work.

Primal world is brought forth by the brain’s right hemisphere.

Iain McGilchrist lists these attributes among others:

Attention is global, broad, vigilant, flexible, sustained.
Sees the bigger picture and seeing things whole and in their context.
Sees an animate world where things presence to us, rather than being re-presented.
Opens up to possibility.
Sees the world that is being mapped.
Helps us understand the world.
Perceives things in motion and in practice.
Living the body.

The tonal and the nagual, and left/right correspondences

In his book Tales of Power (pdf), Carlos Castaneda recounts a conversation in which his teacher don Juan Matus explains the difference between the tonal, analogous to mundane world, and the nagual, analogous to primal world.

He explained that every human being had two sides, two separate entities, two counterparts which became operative at the moment of birth; one was called the “tonal” and the other the “nagual”.

“The tonal is the organizer of the world,” he proceeded. “Perhaps the best way of describing its monumental work is to say that on its shoulders rests the task of setting the chaos of the world in order.

“I would say then that the tonal is a guardian that protects something priceless, our very being. Therefore, an inherent quality of the tonal is to be cagey and jealous of its³ doings. And since its doings are by far the most important part of our lives, it is no wonder that it eventually changes, in every one of us, from a guardian into a guard.”

He stopped and asked me if I had understood. I automatically nodded my head affirmatively and he smiled with an air of incredulity.

“A guardian is broad-minded and understanding,” he explained. “A guard, on the other hand, is a vigilante, narrow-minded and most of the time despotic. I say, then, that the tonal in all of us has been made into a petty and despotic guard when it should be a broad-minded guardian.”

The tonal begins at birth and ends at death, but the nagual never ends.

The nagual is the part of us for which there is no description – no words, no names, no feelings, no knowledge.

The nagual … is at the service of the warrior. It can be witnessed, but it cannot be talked about.

The nagual is the only part of us that can create.

3. I think don Juan is saying that the tonal envies our primal world experiences.

How can you transcend the mundane?

We all shift into primal world under certain conditions — for example when walking in nature (particularly when close to water), sitting in the sun, dancing or listening to music. Newcreators must be able to do so at will. Here are some suggested ways of transcending the mundane, entering primal world and embodying intent.

Breathing cycle

One way of transcending the mundane is by means of the breathing cycle described below. You might want to give it a try.

Before you begin, you must be in a state of faith, with all rules, norms, codes, beliefs, dogmas, narratives and ideologies packed into a suitcase and left in a locker to be reclaimed later.

Now imagine that the top of your head is a satellite dish that receives intent’s originating aspect.

Also imagine that you have a tail that extends to the ground beneath your feet and receives the fulfilling aspect.

Choose a special name for each aspect. The names are not really that important as long as they are respectful and you feel comfortable using them.

As you slowly inhale, imagine intent’s fulfilling aspect rising from the earth, all the way up your spine to the top of your head where the satellite dish sits. While this is happening, subvocalise the special name you have chosen for this aspect. Completely fill your lungs.

And as you slowly exhale, imagine drawing the originating aspect down from the satellite dish, all the way down your spine to your tailbone, then down through the imaginary tail and into the ground. While this is happening, subvocalise the special name you have chosen for this aspect. Completely empty your lungs.

As you continue with this breathing cycle for several minutes, you may become aware of a warm feeling in your heart. This is intent, love, faith, desire (to enrich the world) — whatever word that works for you.

With practice, the breathing cycle will become second nature and you will simply inhale and exhale while subvocalising the special names.

Readiness work

At the outset of a create-the-new project, Readiness work converts the brief into a well-formed design specification for the work that lies ahead.

Readiness work also enables project team members to transcend the mundane by having a felt sense of the new reality in which the intended value will be experienced by the specified beneficiaries.

Some other ways

River Kenna outlines various ways of balancing the hemispheres in this Substack, including the books Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain by Betty Edwards, and The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron.

Continue reading

External websites

My stroke of insight, a TED talk given by neuroanatomist and author Jill Bolte Taylor, in which she talks eloquently about her experience of living through a massive left hemisphere stroke

Readers reply: what are thoughts? Where do they come from – and where do they go? (short answer: no one knows) on The Guardian website